Efficient Loss Prevention Practices for Your Restaurant

The margin of success in the hospitality industry is minuscule, and the unfortunate aspect is that many owners and managers realized this too late. Running a successful bar or restaurant comes down to a big picture formula that all operations and procedures must support and capture all possible revenue and minimize costs. The gap between revenue and cost on a balance sheet is profit, which equates to success or failure. Unlike other businesses, there are daily challenges that arise that dramatically impact profits like food costs, waste control, and employee behavior. By focusing on areas that pose the greatest threat of loss, successful restaurants and bars can maximize their profitability.

Each of these following areas can pose a significant threat to the overall success of your restaurant or bar.

Waste Control– even the smallest things add up over time to equate significant losses. Waste control in a restaurant may seem like a small piece of the cost puzzle and is often overlooked as a potential culprit of unnecessary costs. Waste control can begin with poor product ordering and includes portion control, spoilage, proper menu item preparation, accurate order taking, preventing spills and breakage. By providing the right training for your staff and consistently conveying the message of waste control, you will be able to see significant increases to your profits. Everything from proper food portioning to beer spillage can be controlled by employee compliance to proper procedures and operations (SOPs). Another important aspect in waste control is thorough and efficient record keeping to know exactly what is purchased and what is sold/used each day.

Inventory Management– knowing what to order and when for your restaurant is more of an art than an exact science because, for the most part, customers come in when they want to. Playing into the waste control aspect, proper inventory management is an aspect that you need to get right. Running out of a favorite item on the menu or having food expire before it is needed are the two detrimental components to proper inventory management. The key to being successful is instead of doing a monthly inventory analysis, you should consider increasing the frequency. By having a more up-to-date knowledge of your inventory, the better you can be in making sure that the proper levels of each item are maintained.

Employee Behavior– prior to the days of video cameras, monitoring employee behavior was more like babysitting. An innate level of trust was necessary in order to avoid constant monitoring to ensure that duties were performed and honest behavior used. However, today, aside from effective hiring practices to ensure you find the right employees for your restaurant, digital technology has granted employers with the advantage of being able to monitor employee behavior through the lens of a camera. Glimpse Corps’ video analysis services challenge employee behavior with indisputable employee evaluations and improve work process efficiency and the ability to generate higher sales.

Food Costs– perhaps the most difficult yet important tasks in the restaurant industry is controlling food costs. Depending on your menu and price points, food costs can reach upwards of one-third of total expenses for running a restaurant. When looking at the big picture, it is easy to see that it’s vital to get food costs under control. Unnecessary increases in food costs can be caused by a variety of factors including product purchasing, portion control, waste, complimentary meals, discounting and even theft. Establishing strict policies and procedures is crucial for controlling food costs. Also, proper training and educating of your staff on the roles they play in this important aspect of operations can significantly improve your restaurant’s profitability. Even cutting food costs a percentage point per month can be a significant improvement to the overall profitability.

Glimpse utilizes their proprietary performance insight software to provide restaurants and bars with valuable feedback regarding areas of high risk of employee behavior such as unaccounted sales, standard operating procedures, customer dissatisfaction and even theft. By utilizing the existing cameras and digital video, Glimpse analyzes the captured footage that has been sent to the Cloud and provides management with detailed, audited reports that match images with their corresponding POS transactions.